My mother, Cornelia Schroeder, who has died aged 73, was a virologist specialising in influenza and also the editor of her mother’s memoir.
Cornelia spent the early years of her career in her native East Germany, but after its collapse, she went to work at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London. From 1990 to 1993, she was Wellcome research fellow at the institute’s division of virology, working on isolation of the influenza virus protein. There, she met an international crowd of like-minded people with whom she remained friends and went hiking in west Wales every year - long after she went back to Berlin in 1993, returning to the Charité Institute for Virology to take up a post as associate professor.
